lonelily
by xsynthetic-smile
Summary: COLLECTION: I like too many things and get all confused and hung up running from one falling star to another ‘til I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion. KURAMA. AU.


**lonelily**.  
..;x_syntheticsmile_-- - ---

_W_e first met in a town not too much unlike this one. The people were the same: loud, excitable, over-anxious teenagers eager to leave their marks on the world—anyone and everyone who was too old to be afraid and too young to know what it truly meant to fear. The streets were teeming with them. Everyone was going one way or the other; no one had time to just wait and see. To live. To breathe. Those who tried were left behind and forgotten in less than a day. Back then, it was either keep up or be trampled and, as long as he had a say, Yusuke would make sure the latter never befell me.

He'd walked in just as noisily as all the kids around town, laughing and hanging over the nearest pair of shoulders and still trying to look tough despite his apparent drunkenness. Not that it did any good. I was living with my mother in Fukuoka at the time, a bustling little jewel about 400 miles from Tokyo, but nowhere near as busy as its eastern block counterpart. Moving through a Tokyo cross-street is like squirming around in a sardine tin—no space to move forward, but no space to get out, either. Fukuoka, on the other hand, was a beautiful town; a subtle town—quiet when it needed to be, active every time else, which in turn made it a relatively easy place to live. Looking back now, this might have been the problem all along. While the rest of Japan churned out new adventures each summer, Fukuoka stayed the same. Same buildings, same people, same quiet inspiration which attracted these kids and kept them, eventually, if they stayed for long enough. They say the locals had settled into a state of perpetual disinterest, that only visitors and insomniacs ever bothered to do anything on our lazy streets and when they did, it was almost always loud or almost always dangerous.

So as I said, growing up in Fukuoka I'd come to understand that with the summer came tourists, beatniks, and noise. Raucous noise, screaming noise, laughing noise, crying noise. Yea, noise!—that accursed clamor which never quite made any sense to me, but which always drew me to itself, as though showing me a world to which I wanted to, but did not belong; which stood just far enough to reach for, but never near enough to actually hold. And as I sat there in those days, watching, waiting, I would feel a sharp pain in my heart as I felt every time I saw people I loved head off in the opposite direction in this too-big world. Those summers were a lonely place for me. Then he came around and so began my life on the road, chasing after him and everything he brought along.

I sat at a low-lit booth near the back of a saloon in Kawabata, gently nudging my pen into a few blank pages of my then-nonexistent novel, which of course only continued to remain bare as the night pressed on. The ink soaked through the paper slowly, almost tediously, as though irritated by how easily I let it go to waste. I remember thinking if it would ever form words, or at least good ones—my last story having been penned a good three months prior and consisting simply of vignettes from a few of my older works; always the same fables about the sad-eyed boys and girls I dreamt of whenever I had the time. Beautiful, broken boys, restless souls who were slaves to no one except their own naiveté, soldiers of the open road. And it was right then, as I thought about those kids who'd thought they'd live forever, that one of them slid right into the seat beside me, all messy and grinning, slicking back his hair, and sticking out his hand. His breath smelled of nicotine and week-old toothpaste.

"Name's Urameshi," he half-sneered; politeness notwithstanding. "Me and my friends've been driving for hours straight right from Shibuya and we're feeling pretty tired about now. So we were thinking, you seem like a pretty put-together sort of guy. The kind with a house, maybe even a little girlfriend and a real nice bathroom. So whaddya say? Think you could hook us up for a night?"

He jabbed a single grease-stained thumb toward the bar, where a few other dirt-wearing jailbirds stood around blowing smoke. There was at least seven in their party, if not more. One elder, a couple girls, mostly boys around his age with an assortment of unique, albeit odd, dispositions (I think one of them held a bright blue pacifier between his teeth; another struck me as charmingly obnoxious, as though the words could be put together without contradiction). The shortest among them seemed resigned to boredom and dagger-happy amusement; a serial killer wrapped up in a quaint, four-foot high package. Only unwillingly did I finally turn away.

"There are many people out tonight and many more hotels just down the road." I told him, setting the pen down and folding my hands beneath my chin. "What makes you think that I am any likelier than they to offer my home to strangers?" I made it seem as though I was irritated (though I wasn't) and in no mood to entertain guests (though I was). My green eyes seethed venom and thinned into spiteful slits.

And right about then was where his act faltered. I don't know what it was, but somehow, even though he stood right there in his biker-slash-conman-slash-wrong-side-of-the-tracks get up—his sleeves frayed, his jeans frayed, his face covered in scars from a million lost battles and bruises from a million more won—I couldn't be afraid of him. His brown eyes were penetrating and his grin was malicious, but they were bright too, laughing almost, like this entire thing was just one long running joke that not even his closest friends were in on, but they laughed along anyway like it was just the funniest thing. Put simply, it was contagious and somehow it had wound its way into me as well. Normally I would have granted his request, moreover insisting they all shower first, but by now I was amused—charmed, even, and I couldn't help but play along.

"Right—Right!" he stammered, slamming his palm on the table and sending cups chattering all across the room, "that's exactly what I was saying! All along! See guys? I told you he wouldn't go for it. I told you, I told you." His thick brows furrowed beneath stray bangs and his eyes darted around his head as he thought of another bargaining chip. I almost felt sorry for him; I'd only wanted to tease, but he seemed all too used to scaring people. Not hurt them, but threaten them, always pulling back at the very last moment before any harm could be done. He probably never even thought of what would happen if someone wasn't afraid of him. And he let his face show it.

So I told him, "Don't worry, I was only joking." to which he replied by freezing mid-sentence (Hey toddler-bitch! If you know what's good for you—!) and staring at me in confusion. "I'm sure my mother wouldn't mind having visitors."

"No kiddin'?" he said, his voice suddenly much quieter than it had been. "Pretty guy like you still lives with his mom?" and so on and so forth in a way that I was both flattered and insulted, though it wasn't the first remark I'd heard of its kind. Most people saw only my hair and immediately thought me a female. At the very least, it was comforting to be recognized as a boy for once, "pretty" or not.

And so after explaining my situation (that I was only living here for the summer until school started), Yusuke went back to the others and told them the news. They were joyous. They hipped and hollered and insisted on ordering a few drinks to pass around and celebrate—"Yeah, we don't have to sleep out in the rain tonight!" yelled one. "It's not raining you buffoon," hissed another. Punches were thrown, chairs crashed, laughter abounded. All of them had the strangest shticks—Botan, a bubbly con-artist; Hiei, an ex-convict out on parole; Yukina, his sister, with her nasty habit of being kidnapped and Kuwabara, a wanna-be tough-man and his unhealthy obsession with cats—or else bore problems worthy of myth like Koenma with his oral fixation and Genkai, the eldest, running around Tokyo as an old woman racking up a sum by means of rigged Poker games. Keiko, Yusuke's girl, was a pretty brunette who didn't seem to fit in with the rest—she was smart and she was sweet, sitting there on an old bar stool with her hands on her lap and her calmest brown eyes always listening, listening, to everything the lunatics around her had to say. At the time, she seemed closest to my own heart.

And for the next few hours, we drank and we danced and spoke as good friends who only haven't seen each other in months and after the bar closed and we were sitting on the sidewalk talking in the way friends do, smoke in the air and in our lungs and twisting the yellow street lights carving our silhouettes into the pavement, Yusuke got to his feet, paced around, and decided the thing to do wasn't to go home—Who needs sleep? Life is too damn short to waste being lazy!—but to see what my hometown had to offer. I looked to the sky and all the glittering stars I'd never before noticed and for about five strange seconds I didn't know who I was; the boy from a few hours ago was gone—that quiet intellectual who only wrote about things, never felt them, never lived them, vanished and instead was replaced with one haunted by the night, surrounded by faces he didn't know and emotions he'd never felt and all the sad sounds of the city and he was not afraid, only different—someone else entirely in this wide-open world and as he looked around at everything out there waiting, he decided. "I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page"—and the night was ours for the taking.

And this, really, was the way my whole new life began.

_- - - - le fin._

just to start, i'd like to say how incredibly odd it is to revisit the fandom which brought me to this site in the first place. i don't write sues anymore, if that counts for anything. haha. but yes, i have missed yyh ridiculously. and i plan on staying here for quite a while.

as for the fic itself, i'd originally intended it to be a one-shot, but you know how things go. the story begged to for division and who am i to deny it what it needs? so, yes. consider this a tribute fic—a new character/theme per drabble. drabbles to be updated whenever i feel inspired. in the meantime, reviews are absolutely lovely.

love,  
xsyntheticsmile.

p.s. could someone write me yusuke/kurama fic for my birthday (8/26)? pretty please?


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